Stiglitz was right? So why is he not a memeber of Obama's team?

Stiglitz was right? So why is he not a memeber of Obama's team? A very nice article by Michael Hirsh in the Neewsweek.

Earlier, in his book "Globalization and its Discontents" (2002), Stiglitz became the most prominent voice in Washington to say plainly that free-market absolutism, which began with the Reagan revolution and continued under Clinton (who upon being elected declared the era of "big government" was over), was ill-founded theoretically and disastrous practically. "In 1997 the IMF decided to change its charter to push capital market liberalization," he wrote. "And I said, where is the evidence this is going to be good for developing countries? Why haven't you produced some research showing it was going to be good? They said: we don't need research; we know it's true. They didn't say it in precisely those words, but clearly they took it as religion."

As far back as 1990, Stiglitz argued in a paper (it can be found on The Economist's Voice Web site at www.bppress.com) against securitizing mortgages and selling them because "when banks retained the mortgages which they issued, they had greater incentives to screen loan applicants." He asked, again with startling prescience: "Has securitization been a result of more efficient transactions technologies, or an unfounded reduction in concern about the importance of screening loan applicants?" None other than Milton Friedman, the founding father of the free-market era, told me in an interview before he died that Stiglitz also had been more correct than everyone else about how to transform Russia into a market economy when he argued that institution-building and creating regulatory authorities were an important preliminary step. "In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, I kept being asked what the Russians should do," Friedman told me in 2002. "I said, 'Privatize, privatize, privatize. I was wrong. Joe was right. What we want is privatization, and the rule of law."